Headline: NASA Milestones and Discoveries Fuel Resurgence in U.S. Planetary Science

In the past week, United States planetary science has advanced with key NASA milestones and discoveries. NASA's Artemis Two mission rocket reached its launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida after an overnight journey on January 19, according to ScienceDaily. Engineers there completed pre-fueling checks ahead of a test, staying on schedule for a potential liftoff as early as February 6, NASA reports. This crewed flight will loop astronauts around the Moon, building on decades of lunar research to study its surface and prepare for future landings.

Congress delivered a major win by passing H.R. 6938, rejecting White House cuts to NASA funding for fiscal year 2026, as detailed in The Planetary Society's January newsletter. The bill preserves science programs, safeguarding missions like Juno at Jupiter and New Horizons at the solar system's edge. Only Mars Sample Return faced reduction, signaling strong bipartisan support amid threats of future budget battles.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite reobserved Comet Three I slash Atlas from January 15 to 22, with data now public on the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, NASA Science announces. Meanwhile, the Arcstone instrument wrapped its primary mission, boosting lunar calibration accuracy for better surface mapping.

Discoveries abound too. An Earth-sized planet with a yearlong orbit was spotted, Science.org reports, while NASA's alert highlights a cool Earth-sized candidate transiting a K-dwarf star, hinting at icy worlds. The James Webb Space Telescope revealed distant platypus galaxies at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, as astrophysicist Becky Smethurst noted in her January 23 Night Sky News.

Looking ahead, 2026 promises lunar landers from Intuitive Machines and Blue Origin, Mars arrivals for ESCAPADE satellites, and ESA's Hera at asteroid Didymos. These efforts reveal patterns of resilient funding, prolific small missions, and a push toward habitable exoplanets and solar system frontiers, underscoring a golden age of United States-led exploration.

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